Crackpots for kids!
Apr. 3rd, 2004 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThough there were cranky books that I failed to recognize as such as a child, I'm also proud to say that there were some that I caught. I remember vividly a week spent at a hotel in Virginia Beach with my family around 1978 or '79. My mother bought me a couple of books to read on the trip. At the time I was mostly interested in science popularizations, so she got me the excellent Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder (the companion to the Peter Ustinov TV series), a book I'd still happily recommend to anyone who wants to learn something about the theory of relativity; and the unfortunate Black Holes by honest-to-God mathematical physicist and way-out dude John G. Taylor.
Taylor decided that the metaphysical shock of actually reading about the horror of black holes was too much for the average man in the street to withstand unprepared, so he spent the entire first half of the book building up to it by rambling on about anything else that crossed his mind, including the reality of psychic powers, ancient astronauts, life after death, and the possibility of disembodied souls surviving the destruction of the universe, all of which he believed in.
The most surprising statement in this half of the book, surprising because it turned out to be true, was that Carl Sagan once proposed an ancient-astronauts hypothesis. (You can look it up: it's in Sagan and Shklovskii's Intelligent Life in the Universe, and I think it's in one of the bits that young Carl Sagan wrote. He thought that the Sumerian god Oannes, represented as a sort of bipedal fish-man who taught men language, might have been an alien. I don't think Sagan ever took the hypothesis all that seriously, though: more than anything else he displayed it as an example of how von Däniken types might go about framing their hypotheses more plausibly.)
Then the second half of Black Holes actually was about black holes, and had some correct information in it as far as it went, but this other sensational and cranky stuff kept leaking into it. For instance, at one point he spoke of the possibility of making a "naked singularity", that is, a singularity in space-time not hidden by an event horizon. Just what a naked singularity might do is a bit of a mystery; current physical theory can't predict what might pop out of it. Taylor chose this moment to wax Lovecraftian, and decided that the horrifying mystery of the total breakdown of known physical law would cause any beholder to go insane. He then came up with a pulpy scenario about a mad scientist who holds the world hostage by threatening the make a naked singularity, whose public eldritchity would cause all men to run mad in the streets the moment its existence became known.
Not much of this impressed me, and I lost track of the paperback years later. But I could never find anyone else who had actually read this book (there was a much more popular book called Black Holes that came out around the same time, written by somebody else) until I read a scathing review of it by Martin Gardner many years later, and was happy to find that I had not imagined the whole thing.
As Paul Simon might say, when I look back on all the crap I read in childhood, it's a wonder I can think at all. (Though the brand-new camera I took to Virginia Beach was not loaded with Kodachrome; it was a Polaroid One-Step.) Still, I think my parents did right by me when they exposed me to some of this; it ultimately served as a sort of mental inoculation, because I had eventually come to decide on the basis of my own research and reasoning what was probably nonsense, instead of just taking it from them. Indeed, I eventually became much more of a skeptic about paranormal things than they are.
Taylor decided that the metaphysical shock of actually reading about the horror of black holes was too much for the average man in the street to withstand unprepared, so he spent the entire first half of the book building up to it by rambling on about anything else that crossed his mind, including the reality of psychic powers, ancient astronauts, life after death, and the possibility of disembodied souls surviving the destruction of the universe, all of which he believed in.
The most surprising statement in this half of the book, surprising because it turned out to be true, was that Carl Sagan once proposed an ancient-astronauts hypothesis. (You can look it up: it's in Sagan and Shklovskii's Intelligent Life in the Universe, and I think it's in one of the bits that young Carl Sagan wrote. He thought that the Sumerian god Oannes, represented as a sort of bipedal fish-man who taught men language, might have been an alien. I don't think Sagan ever took the hypothesis all that seriously, though: more than anything else he displayed it as an example of how von Däniken types might go about framing their hypotheses more plausibly.)
Then the second half of Black Holes actually was about black holes, and had some correct information in it as far as it went, but this other sensational and cranky stuff kept leaking into it. For instance, at one point he spoke of the possibility of making a "naked singularity", that is, a singularity in space-time not hidden by an event horizon. Just what a naked singularity might do is a bit of a mystery; current physical theory can't predict what might pop out of it. Taylor chose this moment to wax Lovecraftian, and decided that the horrifying mystery of the total breakdown of known physical law would cause any beholder to go insane. He then came up with a pulpy scenario about a mad scientist who holds the world hostage by threatening the make a naked singularity, whose public eldritchity would cause all men to run mad in the streets the moment its existence became known.
Not much of this impressed me, and I lost track of the paperback years later. But I could never find anyone else who had actually read this book (there was a much more popular book called Black Holes that came out around the same time, written by somebody else) until I read a scathing review of it by Martin Gardner many years later, and was happy to find that I had not imagined the whole thing.
As Paul Simon might say, when I look back on all the crap I read in childhood, it's a wonder I can think at all. (Though the brand-new camera I took to Virginia Beach was not loaded with Kodachrome; it was a Polaroid One-Step.) Still, I think my parents did right by me when they exposed me to some of this; it ultimately served as a sort of mental inoculation, because I had eventually come to decide on the basis of my own research and reasoning what was probably nonsense, instead of just taking it from them. Indeed, I eventually became much more of a skeptic about paranormal things than they are.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-03 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-03 06:54 pm (UTC)John Gribbon (sp?) has done some flake pop science but seems to have calmed down.
Frank Tipler, well, that's out there.
I think that unusual ideas can be enriching (even if wrong; "not even wrong" may be a different matter) but they get unfair attention for being sensational.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-04 06:50 am (UTC)(I can state to my satisfaction that I never did think "The Jupiter Effect" made sense. It's a mystery how he got Isaac Asimov to write a foreword.)